Wildlife

Big groups drop appeal Eleven environmental groups, including the Wilderness Society and National Audubon Society, have decided not to appeal a recent federal court decision upholding President Clinton’s Pacific Northwest forest plan, known as Option Nine. While the groups agree the plan fails to protect and restore the heavily logged ecosystem, they say they’ll focus […]

Utah county commissioners passed wilderness recommendations on to Gov. Mike Leavitt March 31, and, as expected, they didn’t ask for much. The counties recommended about 1 million acres of Bureau of Land Management wilderness – about half what the BLM itself recommended and one-sixth of that urged by the Utah Wilderness Coalition. The counties left […]

The wolf wasn’t guilty The wolf shot in late January in central Idaho did not kill the calf it was feeding on, says the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In a letter to Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R, acting regional director Thomas Dwyer said veterinary pathologists who examined the calf concluded that the animal died […]

A measure that forces the Forest Service to nearly double the timber harvest on national forests over the next two years is buzzing through Congress. The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the controversial amendment to the appropriations recision bill 275-150. Now it heads to the Senate where environmentalists hope to extricate the so-called Taylor-Dicks […]

In a promising sign for the effort to restore the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park, wolves imported in January are already trying to breed. Although the 14 wolves shipped from Canada to Yellowstone are still cooped up in one-acre pens in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley, rangers have observed male wolves attempting to mount female wolves. Biologists […]

Wyoming Gov. Jim Geringer, a newly elected Republican, recently vetoed a bill that would have placed a $1,000 bounty on wolves shot outside Yellowstone National Park. The legislation would have authorized payment to hunters who shoot wolves outside the park and offered free legal defense for the hunters if prosecuted by federal agencies (HCN, 1/23/95). […]

While the federal government was spending millions of dollars restoring wolves to central Idaho, one of its agencies was killing a wolf nearby. The federal Animal Damage Control program accidentally killed one of the endangered wolves in a coyote trap near Priest River, Idaho, in early February. The trap was an M-44, a baited, spring-loaded […]

The Gunnison National Forest in western Colorado is involved in another hot access question. The last access dispute – with developer Tom Chapman – resulted in a land trade that thus far has given Chapman a $2 million profit (HCN, 1/23/95). That trade was made over strenuous objections from residents of the ski town of […]